the verdure of the tree, and that the sculpture refers to the grave of Osiris at Philae, of which Plutarch says that it was overshadowed by a _methide_ plant, taller than any olive-tree. This sculpture, it may be observed, occurs in the same chamber in which Osiris is represented as a corpse with ears of corn sprouting from him.(992) In inscriptions Osiris is referred to as “the one in the tree,” “the solitary one in the acacia,” etc.(993) On the monuments he sometimes appears as a mummy covered with a tree or with plants.(994) It accords with the character of Osiris as a tree-spirit that his worshippers were forbidden to injure fruit-trees, and with his character as a god of vegetation in general that they were not allowed to stop up wells of water, which are so important for purposes of irrigation in hot southern lands.(995) The original meaning of the goddess Isis is still more difficult to determine than that of her brother and husband Osiris. Her attributes and epithets were so numerous that in the hieroglyphics she is called “the many-named,” “the thousand-named,” and in Greek inscriptions “the myriad-named.”(996) Tiele confesses candidly that “it is now impossible to tell precisely to what natural phenomena the character of Isis at first referred.”(997) Mr. Renouf states that Isis was the Dawn,(998) but without assigning any reason whatever for the identification. There are at least some grounds for seeing in her a goddess of corn. According to Diodorus, whose authority appears to have been the Egyptian historian Manetho, the discovery of wheat and barley was attributed to Isis, and at her festivals stalks of these grains were carried in procession to commemorate the boon she had conferred on men. Further, at harvest-time, when the Egyptian reapers had cut the first stalks, they laid them down and beat their breasts, lamenting and calling upon Isis.(999) Amongst the epithets by which she is designated on the inscriptions are “creatress of the green crop,” “the green one, whose greenness is like the greenness of the earth,” and “mistress of bread.”(1000) According to Brugsch she is “not only the creatress of the fresh verdure of vegetation which covers the earth, but is actually the green corn-field itself, which is personified as a goddess.”(1001) This is confirmed by her epithet _Sochit_ or _Sochet_, meaning “a corn-field,” a sense which the word still retains in Coptic.(1002) It is in this character of a corn-goddess that the Greeks conceived Isis, for they identified her with Demeter.(1003) In a Greek epigram she is described as “she who has given birth to the fruits of the earth,” and “the mother of the ears of corn,”(1004) and in a hymn composed in her honour she speaks of herself as “queen of the wheat-field,” and is described as “charged with the care of the fruitful furrow’s wheat-rich path.”(1005)